Cosmographies of the Divine Feminine: Cosmic Religiosity in the Qadeš Stelae and the Hermeneutics of the Cosmic Body in New Kingdom Ancient Egypt

Abstract

The mutual introduction, translatability, and acculturation of foreign symbol systems has become extensively documented in archeological and textual sources. Nevertheless, rarely is it emphasized that the earliest iconographic attestation of the ecumenical Holy, of Q-d-š as a code of consciousness in the Near East at large, and in New Kingdom Egypt in particular, was conceived as a Numinous Nude, Divine Feminine, Cosmic Body. This multi-disciplinary thesis, which engages religious studies and archaeological contexts, contributes to the study of the Divine Feminine by investigating the hermeneutics of the Q-d-š/Qadeš iconography through a close reading of the earliest known Qadeš stela, Stela of Takaret from Memphis (Berlin ÄM 21626). The exceptionally close and continuous contact between nature, the semiotic, and semantic realms of the region’s ancient cosmotheist culture, allows for an entry into the cosmographic Divine Feminine “maps of consciousness” of the New Kingdom theological world. Moving beyond the descriptive analyses and taxonomical approaches of previous scholarship, this study assumes a deeper iconological approach; a contextualized religious “composition within a composition” framework for the Qadeš phenomena. By comparatively analyzing mytheme parallels and associations with the similarly spatialized Divine Feminine nbt pt, Lady of the Heavens, Nout, through corresponding cosmographical texts such as the Amduat, Book of the Night, Book of Nout, and the Shadow Clock Text, this study locates the Numinous Nude Qadeš artifacts within the larger Divine Feminine Cosmic Body theological zeitgeist of the New Kingdom time period. This thesis argues that this Numinous Nude Divine Feminine Cosmic Body symbolism metaphorized holistic, ecological, cyclical, cosmic space and time processes, therefore, rendering them fundamentally translatable, into symbolic cultural systems of multivalent micro-macro cosmic Holy meanings; a cultural translatability crucial to sustaining cultural life in the Near East. It demonstrates the role of the Numinous Nude Divine Feminine Cosmic Body as a “tertium comparationis” of the Holy, through a cosmotheist symbiotic framework of life and death as cosmic gestational journeys of transformation and renewal. The study concludes with a discussion of the larger socio ecological implications of these findings: that in a climate of rising tides in violent religious fundamentalism disenfranchising women’s bodies from the history of the Holy, and thus culture from the nature of creation itself, the quest for the cultural inclusion of Divine Feminine Cosmic Body wisdom can no further be delayed.